Tag Archives: no exit

Existentialists tend to discourse on our sorry lot as humans in this life, caged between birth and death, trapped in this existence, the terror and nausea of realizing how lousy it all really is. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this terror as the greatest weight: What if this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.

The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust!

Jean-Paul Sartre expounded on the horror in his play No Exit: You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do. Luckily, thanks to our evolved sensibilities and their application to technology, we can see the kernel of this philosophical gobbledygook captured in profound and eternal loops.

The GIF – or Graphic Interchange Format – is, as Albert Camus wrote, basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all. There is only absurdity and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

The room is long, a rectangle of weak fluorescent light, smoked glass and metal slats, the desks tucked tightly together, bottles and urns in smart ready rows, cameras pointed at each other, waiting to blink. “I honestly can’t remember the substance of the meeting.”

“Strike that.”

The stasis of the event settles in at length, turns on itself, the focus on the banal, to prove a point – my point! – no matter what, to win the fight of fights, which is no fight at all. The door leads into a hall back into a room like this, another door, another corridor, this room again. The faces stare back, featureless, trapped in the dull light and sound. “No, don’t strike that.”